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Transco fined £15m for killer gas blast

Issue date

02 Sep 2005

Transco fined £15m for killer gas blast

The gas supply company Transco was fined a record £15 million last week after being convicted of serious safety breaches which led to the deaths of a family of four in an explosion. As well as imposing the heavy financial penalty - the previous biggest fine in UK health and safety law had been £2 million (Risks 151) - the judge, Lord Carloway, condemned the firm's lack of remorse and attempts to evade blame. The blast in Larkhall, Lanarkshire, in 1999 which claimed the lives of Andrew Findlay, 34, his wife Janette, 37, and their children, Stacey, 13, and Daryl, 11, had been caused by a leak from a severely corroded gas main outside their home. The jury's guilty verdict against Transco, which made a profit of £390 million last year on a turnover of £2.2bn, was unanimous. The Lord Advocate, Colin Boyd, QC, said he had wanted to bring a charge of culpable homicide (Risks 92), but Transco persuaded appeal judges to dismiss the charge, which named no individual director or employee (Risks 109). The Crown was left with a charge under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, where there was the possibility of an unlimited fine. STUC health and safety officer Ian Tasker said the fine was 'a penalty that quite obviously reflects the seriousness of the breaches of health and safety regulations involved in this case.' TUC head of safety Hugh Robertson said: 'We are pleased that the courts finally seem to be taking health and safety offences seriously. However it does illustrate why we also need an offence of corporate killing. A conviction under the health and safety at work act is still seen as an administrative breach, whatever the penalty. We believe that this case also reinforces the case for more stringent duties on directors with penalties for those that allow situations like this to arise.'

TUC news release. HSE news release. The Scotsman. BBC News Online and related story on corporate accountability. Scotland Today. Sky News. The Guardian. Financial Times.

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